Tipping Point | My 3 Little Birds- Self-Improvement through ...

Last Friday afternoon I pulled into a crowded toy store parking lot. I?d forgotten their Christmas lists at home so I paused for a moment, trying to mentally recount what was scribbled on notebook paper.

A jewelry making set and paper dolls.

A Star Wars LEGO set.

A Wii game, or was it X Box, and what?s the difference anyway?

The regular chatter of radio news suddenly became more than background noise. A gunman. Elementary school. Eighteen children.

Gone.

I sat in my car for a moment, confused. I?d been in an appointment for 2 hours that morning. And while I?d gotten wind of an event at a Connecticut school earlier that day, it had been reported that there?d only been one fatality, possibly two. The news of these children? who?d later number 20? all killed in their classrooms was too much for my heart to bear.

I?d soon learn that I wasn?t alone in my feelings of grief and loss for children I?d never met. I cried with a friend on the phone. I spoke with another of the tragedy as we waited for our lunch orders. My eyes welled with tears when I locked eyes with a preschool teacher later in the afternoon; we didn?t need to say anything at all.

We may not have known those whose lives were lost so tragically on Friday, but our grief doesn?t recognize that.

Research tells us that there?s a pattern in the way the grieving recount their stories.

It was a beautiful Tuesday in September. The sky was impossibly blue.

He was shoveling snow one minute, like he always does, and then the next minute he was gone.

We were at the table. The kids were laughing. Then the phone rang.

We set the scene in our grief narrative, contrasting the ordinary to the extraordinariness of shock.

I pulled into the toy store parking lot, then the radio told me the news. Eighteen children killed in their school.?

Parents everywhere are telling their grief stories today.

Grief for those who died.

Grief for the parents whose lives will never be the same.

Grief for our own children who?ve had to learn things we wish we could have protected them from.

But more profound, perhaps, is my sense of grieving for this culture.

Sending my kids out into a world where the unspeakable happens is a fact of life, but the violent deaths of 1st graders in their classrooms is another matter entirely. As someone suggested on the radio this morning, we?ve reached a tipping point.

I hope so.

Source: http://my3littlebirdsblog.com/2012/12/tipping-point.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tipping-point

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